Turning Down the Heat
With temperatures rising worldwide, climatologists predict a planetary emergency. We have the means to avert the crisis, but do we have the political will?
by James R. Udall

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GLOBAL WARMING IS THAT FAMILIAR NEMESIS, the energy crisis, recurring in a new guise. For decades the prevailing assumption has been that a fossil-fuel-based economy would be constrained by oil, gas, and coal depletion. Logical enough. But global warming has turned that paradigm on its head: It now appears that the atmosphere's ability to assimilate fossil-fuel wastes will be the limiting factor. The question is no longer how much oil, gas, and coal we have, but how much we can afford to bum.

At a Hawaiian field station, Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography has measured the annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958. Extrapolating from his findings, experts conclude that to slow global warming would require a 20 percent cut in worldwide fossil-fuel combustion; to stop it would require at least a 50 percent reduction, back to the levels of the early 1960s. At the moment trends are headed pell-mell in the opposite direction: According to United Nations figures, worldwide fossil-fuel consumption may double by 2040. Trend is not destiny, but bucking this momentum is an enormous challenge.

Realistically, we will not be able to wean ourselves from fossil fuels overnight. But there are two ways to shrink CO2 emissions while we make the transition to renewables. First, we can switch power plants from coal to natural gas, the cleanest-burning fossil fuel. Jack Lillywhite of Bechtel Power Corporation says, "Because natural gas produces only half as much CO2 for a given amount of energy, it is the sexy fuel of the 1990s, a good short-term solution."

The second and far more potent way to reduce CO2 emissions is to wring more work out of fossil fuels, to burn them more efficiently. Efficiency improvements could slash CO2 emissions dramatically. A recent World Resources Institute study concluded that developed countries could halve fossil-fuel usage by embracing new conservation and efficiency initiatives.

The United States has a special responsibility in this regard: Americans constitute 5 percent of the world's population but emit 23 percent of the world's CO2. On a per-capita basis, they each spew out a staggering 18 tons of CO2 annually. "If the United States doesn't take the lead to reduce emissions, no other nation has the slightest incentive to cut back," says National Audubon Society vice president Brooks Yeager.

Increased energy efficiency would benefit the United States in other ways, too, by reducing trade deficits, enhancing national security and industrial competitiveness, and minimizing such vexing environmental problems as urban smog and acid rain. To start, the nation merely needs to build on progress it has already made. According to energy expert Amory Lovins, since 1973 the United States has obtained seven times as much energy from efficiency savings as from all increases in energy supply. A paltry 5-mile-per-gallon improvement in the auto fleet helped lessen U.S. dependence on the OPEC nations; if the superguzzlers of the early 1970s still ruled the road, we'd be importing nearly 13 million more barrels of oil a day.

For efficiency to play a major role in reducing U.S. CO2 emissions, however, its citizens will have to address a perverse outcome of past successes: Energy is again cheap enough to waste. As a result, new cars are becoming less fuel efficient. (Chrysler recently announced plans to build an eight-liter, ten-cylinder engine for its new muscle car, the Viper.) Net energy demand, flat for 15 years, has begun to increase.

Why the backsliding? The United States, unlike most other industrial nations, hasn't harnessed market forces with an energy plan. Gasoline is precious, polluting, and nonrenewable. When it is half the price of milk, consumers get the wrong message. "Our failure to formulate an energy plan is just awesomely stupid, no matter how you look at it," says Broecker.

This governmental failure may finally be rectified if Congress passes either of two landmark bills: Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth's National Energy Policy Act or Rhode Island Rep. Claudine Schneider's Global Warming Prevention Act. While slightly different in approach, both bills mandate a 20 percent reduction in the country's CO2 emissions by the year 2000. Adopting either bill would send an unmistakable signal to the rest of the world that the United States is serious about combating global warming.

If, on the other hand, the signal is not sent, and developing countries continue to emulate Americans' thriftless practices, worldwide CO2 emissions will unquestionably spiral upward. One bellwether is China. To power its ambitious industrialization program, China plans to nearly double coal consumption in the next decade. By 2025 it may be the world's largest emitter of CO2.

Part of the problem is China's reliance on outmoded technologies. A few years ago, Lovins says, the Chinese government built more than 100 refrigerator factories. Unfortunately, an inefficient refrigerator design was chosen, committing the nation to billions of dollars' worth of power plants to serve those appliances--and millions of tons of unnecessary CO2 emissions.

The situation is much the same throughout the Third World and the Eastern bloc. The Soviet economy is almost twice as energy-intensive as the United States', for example, and coal burning threatens to make much of Eastern Europe uninhabitable. East Germany is the only country to produce more CO2 per capita than the United States.

These political, cultural, and economic realities underscore how difficult it will be to implement an international plan to reduce global warming. Before the world's leaders can reach agreement on a unified strategy, they must grapple with a number of thorny questions: How should CO2 reductions be apportioned? Which countries should bear the largest burdens? How can efficiency technologies best be disseminated? And, most critical, how can international agreements to reduce CO2 emissions be policed?

Because the atmosphere is a commons, no country has an incentive to control its CO2 emissions--unless it has ironclad assurances that other countries will also control theirs. This dilemma has prompted scientists and international leaders to call for an international CO2 treaty, enforced with trade sanctions and a fossil-fuel levy, or "climate-protection tax."

Most Third World countries regard this proposal as grossly inequitable. "Seventy-five percent of CO2 emissions come from industrialized nations--they have caused the problem," says Noel Brown of the United Nations Environment Programme. "Why should poor countries, which haven't shared the benefits of fossil-fuel use, now be asked to share the burdens?" Such disputes could easily torpedo attempts to negotiate a CO2-reduction treaty.

Amory Lovins maintains that the coercive approach is not only unwise but unnecessary. "Developing countries can achieve their economic goals only by building energy efficiency into their infrastructures from scratch," he says. "It's in their interest to adopt these technologies, and it's in our interest to make them widely available."

Clearly everyone would benefit if Third World countries moved toward sustainable economic development based on renewable rather than nonrenewable fuels. Why build coal-fired generating plants and power lines to send electricity to rural villages that could be more cheaply served with solar energy? Why divert precious capital to automobiles when mass transit is more economical? After all, economic progress is no longer inextricably linked to fossil-fuel use, air pollution, and acid rain. Recent advances in renewable technologies could allow Third World countries to leapfrog the dirtiest stages of the industrialization process.

Although U.S. funding for renewables was slashed during the 1980s, solar, wind, and biomass technologies are coming on strong both in the United States and abroad. Renewables currently supply 9 percent of the nation's energy, a number that is projected to double by the year 2000. Renewables are also the only energy source whose production costs are falling, despite much larger federal subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Zoltan Kiss, chair of Chronar Corporation, a leading manufacturer of solar cells, believes that with modest government support solar power could displace up to 50 percent of the fossil fuels used in the United States within 25 years. Technical advances have made it possible to get as much energy from the sun and a ton of sand (made into solar cells) as from a ton of uranium in a nuclear power plant.

And what about nuclear power plants? Time, Newsweek, and the New Republic have suggested that these facilities may be one answer to global warming because they emit no CO2. Even if that virtue outweighed the plants' environmental shortcomings, it is unlikely that nuclear power has a role to play: A recent study by two of Lovins's associates, Bill Keepin and Gregory Kats, indicates that if the world's nations were to undertake a crash nuclear program, building one nuclear power plant per week for the next 37 years, CO2 emissions would be reduced by only 11 to 19 percent. Far better, say Keepin and Kats, to emphasize renewable and efficiency technologies, which can displace seven times more CO2 than nuclear per dollar invested. (See "Reactors Redux," March/April.) Lovins, too, insists that efficiency is the better buy: "The United States has spent a trillion dollars on nuclear, which now provides half as much energy as wood. Let's back winners, not losers."

Developing new efficiency and renewable technologies will do little good, however, unless they can be widely deployed in poor countries. To halt global warming, Japan, the United States, and the European Community may have to forge a new ecological alliance with hand-to-mouth countries like India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, Poland, and the Soviet Union to help them create a sustainable-energy future. A mind-boggling task on the order of a new Marshall Plan, this effort will take money--lots of it.

The Worldwatch Institute suggests that we redefine security in ecological rather than military terms, and divert $150 billion (one-sixth of the annual global military budget) to environmental defense. But why stop there? If, as it sometimes seems, nations require an adversary to maintain their cohesiveness, let global warming be the foil--it's the common enemy. Though ancient antagonisms won't vanish overnight, armies are vestigial from an ecological perspective: The globe needs tree-planters more than soldiers.

"Plant a tree, cool the globe." That's the slogan of Global ReLeaf, a reforestation program launched last year by the American Forestry Association (AFA). As trees grow, they recycle CO2; a fast-growing tree can "fix" as much as 48 pounds of CO2 each year. A tree's ability to shade buildings, particularly in urban concrete jungles, can save 15 times that amount indirectly in avoided energy costs.

Although there is more than a whiff of expiation about it, a global tree-planting program is among the most sensible of the many imaginative schemes advanced to abate global warming. (Some crackpot examples: unfurling a gigantic foil-faced "sun shield" in space, using a laser to blast CFCs out of the sky, covering oceans with Styrofoam chips to increase their reflectivity, and detonating nuclear bombs to create a limited "nuclear winter.") George Woodwell of Woods Hole has proposed a worldwide reforestation program. According to his calculations, a 667,000-square-mile tract (an area bigger than Alaska) would remove about 15 percent of the world's annual CO2 emissions. Even if a program of this scope could be implemented, stabilizing the climate would still require steep cuts in fossil-fuel use, Woodwell cautions. Planting trees is a stopgap, not a panacea.

Halting deforestation is another vital task. When a tree burns or decays it releases the carbon it has absorbed over its entire lifetime. The deforestation of tropical rainforests--now ongoing at a rate of 50 acres per minute--accounts for about 20 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. The United Nations' Noel Brown argues that developed countries should relieve Third World countries of the $l.3 trillion debt that is driving much of this headlong destruction: "The debt crunch gives many countries a financial incentive to clearcut. Swapping that debt for rainforest preservation would be an investment in the future of the planet.

A CENTURY FROM NOW historians may conclude that the threat of global warming was the best thing that ever happened to the environment. Humanity has an enormous investment in a stable climate, and global warming gives us a compelling, selfish economic incentive to change patterns of energy use that have proved so harmful to Earth's beauty and biodiversity.

But will global warming galvanize us? Can mankind, in Noel Brown's words, "Make a quantum conceptual leap, look beyond our paralyzing manias, and mobilize human energy and creativity in defense of Earth?" Can we resolve the growing inconsonance between natural laws and human laws? Can we break our addiction to fossil fuels?

If we meet these challenges, we will solve many other heretofore intractable environmental problems--everything from acid rain to urban smog. If, however, the human response falls short, these problems will mount until they overwhelm the biosphere. From an ecological perspective, only two outcomes are possible: a big win . . . or an even bigger loss.

JAMES R. UDALL has covered Utah wilderness, water marketing, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for Sierra. He also writes for Audubon, National Wildlife, and Outside.